particularly that Rivers had been 'thrilling on the self-protective nature of shell-shock and kindred disorders.' When the yacht docked at Southhampton, Bennett chanced upon a cluttered second-hand bookstore and conceived a story about two misers that would become Riceyman Steps.
George Moore described the plot of Riceyman Steps, which he greatly admired, as 'A bookseller crosses the road to get married-that's all.' Moore's description is not quite all, but it is much. The seller of rare and used books, a middle-aged denizen of Clerkenwell named Henry Earlforward, courts and marries Violet Arb, a widow who runs a confectioner's shop across the street from him. Before their marriage, they each employ a charwoman named Elsie Sprickett, who becomes their general maid once they have wed, Violet selling her business to move in with Henry. Elsie loves Joe, a neurasthenic veteran of the Great War, who is both the servant and patient of a panel doctor named Raste. Joe becomes wild one night, strikes Elsie, and departs for more than a year. The Earlforward marriage, happy at first, increasingly flickers into conflict over Henry's extreme parsimony. By the time Joe returns, feverish from a recurrence of his wartime malaria, both the Earlforwards are gravely ill. They die; Joe recovers. The bookshop's stock is sold; the shop itself is purchased by the same cheesemonger who had acquired Violet's premises. Elsie and Joe become maid and manservant to Dr. Raste.
The bookseller's shop is also a House of England, a shrunken, dusty Bladesover; old, valuable, unread books, 'hopeless, resigned, martyrized,' litter its floors; when a blind slips down, deepening the gloom, — 677- no attempt is made to raise it. The shop's inhabitants continually both recall and enact the social certainties of an earlier England. But the apocalypse has now come-'The truth is, we haven't been straight in here since 1914,' Henry Earlforward declares to a customer early in the novel. The customer, Dr. Raste, represents one of the disorienting new conditions; an ex-soldier, he 'had learnt manners above his original station in a strange place-Palestine, under Allenby.' Earlforward conceives an immediate distaste for the doctor. He dislikes his «interfering» manner; in effect, he cannot stomach a man who represents in his own person the leveling changes the war has set in motion. Furthermore, Raste warns him of a possible extension of these disarrangements to his own establishment in the form of desertion by his charwoman, Elsie. Bennett had foreseen the war's acceleration of social change days after it began, marveling in his journal on August 10, 1914, that 'the fear of revolution or serious social uproar after the War does not trouble anybody. Few even think of it.' The brisk, efficient panel doctor invades the disorder of this essentially prewar house, yet himself acts as a symbol of postwar disorientations for the place's owner, to whom the shop is a scrupulously and delicately organized achievement.
Signs of apocalypse litter the novel, and yet they are apocalyptic chiefly from the conservative perspective of Henry and his wife Violet; or, rather, the undermining of their unchallenged perspective is the apocalypse. The postwar inflation and Bolshevism become for Henry evidence that England resembles ancient Rome on the verge of its collapse. But Henry spins this public apocalypse from his own need to maintain private control, using it to frighten his wife into obedience. He takes the opportunity of a newspaper report on a murder in a Clerkenwell communist club to inveigh against famine in the Volga region; the practice of severe economy seems the only means to achieve security in such a world of perils. In fact, he and his wife slowly starve themselves to death, hoarding gold against the imminent collapse of England. Henry's interpretations of public events are projections of his own mingled fears and desires for a personal apocalypse. On one hand, he craves the security of the known, the traditional, the past-a seller of antique books, he plans at the beginning of the novel to court Violet with tales of old Clerkenwell; he honeymoons with her among the lifeless figures of history at Madame Tussaud's; he approves her removal to London Hospital because it is the city's oldest. Henry's 'grand passion' is not merely saving money; it is achieving predictability, paring down -678- his life so as to avoid the accidents of desire. Through his miserliness, he withholds himself-to spend nothing is to do nothing, to risk nothing. And yet he unlocks his heart long enough to surrender himself to the unknown future, the unknown other, through marriage.
Henry Earlforward, in fact, is Arnold Bennett made up for a part. Though emphatically not a miser, Bennett, like Henry, considered himself 'a great practical philosopher'; Bennett, like Henry, was 'highly nervously organized,' registering emotions as physical ailments; Bennett, like Henry, lived in a minutely organized fashion, even writing 'pocket philosophies' with such titles as The Human Machine and How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day; Bennett, like Henry, so offended his wife by his mild pertinacity that she branded him 'an utterly selfish man.' Through the figure of Henry, Bennett revises both himself and the realist assumptions of much prewar, premodernist fiction (including his own). In his notebook for Riceyman Steps, Bennett had written on a page headed «Henry»: 'Eternal delusion: he could manage.' The war had taught Bennett to distrust the positivist assumptions that underlie even so pessimistic a novel as Tono-Bungay. Before the war, when Balzac was still his master, Bennett had created a miser in whom he embodied all the values he most despised: Ephraim Tellwright of Anna of the Five Towns, who represents paternalist authority, indifference to beauty, and the reign of unreasoning habit. Now he created a miser who embodied the traits he had always most valued: self-control, organization, reason. By so doing, he reenvisioned as a sort of neurosis the old progressive belief in the adequacy of reason to reorganize a manifestly ill-constructed society. Bennett thus bares the conservative root of the old progressivism. It refuses to acknowledge the irrational self, insisting on the vision of a reality separate from and knowable by consciousness, on the possibility of basing a just society on what the world itself, not desire, dictates. In Riceyman Steps, Bennett reinterprets the submission of desire to reason as self-protection. One submits to «impersonal» reason to avoid facing oneself, but nevertheless acts on desire; unconscious motives irremediably taint conscious reason. In particular, Bennett reads male reason as a means to impose dominion over women.
Riceyman Steps teems with unconscious communication, with the symbolic expression of unacknowledged motives. Late in the novel, Henry, apparently desperate to halt Elsie's gluttonous consumption of the minuscule portions of food he has already refused himself, asks Violet to help fool Elsie into believing he is dying. Elsie, he reasons, could -679- not possibly scruple to steal food from a dying man. But the ruse is unconsciously directed elsewhere; Henry really is dying, as he unwittingly informs his wife through the medium of Elsie. Another instance of such communication occurs earlier, when Henry's wife pays to have his shop vacuum-cleaned as a wedding present, then recklessly continues to tidy up. Henry objects on the reasonable grounds that his business requires filth to convince customers that bargains lurk beneath the dust. But he also asks one of the workmen, referring to the vacuumed dirt, 'Do you sell it? Do you get anything for it?' The question unveils a cluster of associated secrets. Even on his wedding night, Henry cannot resist the retention of waste, of money, of the self; soon, he will embark on a parallel string of rejections, disclaiming food, sex, the other. More and more as the novel continues, Henry perceives Violet as the enemy of his grand passion, acting in sinister concert with Elsie. Henry's rational, conscious organization is more and more clearly shown to be a device by which he unconsciously struggles to preserve the inviolability of his own perspective from the women of his house.
This post-Freudian image of the human mind calls for a literary perspectivism; that is, a recognition that no one angle of observation has absolute precedence over others. But Bennett's novel seems to employ an omniscient narrator who offers an authoritative perspective on events-in both senses of 'authoritative.' And Bennett wrote Riceyman Steps after he had reviewed Ulysses, beside which the polyglossia of Riceyman Steps seems very tame. In creating his own 'form to supersede Balzac's,' however, Bennett subverted the realist conventions from within, rather than fighting to escape the orbit of those conventions, as the modernists did. While the modernists assuredly developed many techniques that remained forever outside Bennett's scope, he developed a form that at once recognized the conventions of reading as conventions and retained the detailed portraiture of socioeconomic influences that such modernists as Joyce and Woolf sacrificed. Bennett accomplishes this feat by introducing an unreliable third-person narrator whose observations and analyses, though they seem to bear the weight of authorial judgment, undermine themselves in the course of the novel. Early in Riceyman Steps, the narrator describes the environs and populace of Riceyman Square as a
dingy and sordid neighborhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter… and where the -680- immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results, and, on Sunday morning, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities.
The relatively urbane Earlforwards seem 'strangely, even fatally, out of place' in this neighborhood. But their story is a tale of 'bloody crime and sexual irregularity.' Violet complains of Henry's increasing sexual incapacity; he dies after a theft (of sixpence). They share the most squalid passions of the district they inhabit, if in sublimated form: Violet can, without a program, identify all but one of the notable murders in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. Though it comes as a great surprise to the reader when, at the end of the novel, Henry and Violet
